{"id":511,"date":"2014-11-17T15:34:29","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T15:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/?page_id=511"},"modified":"2016-02-02T22:48:58","modified_gmt":"2016-02-02T22:48:58","slug":"eye-on-art-2014","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/?page_id=511","title":{"rendered":"Eye On Art – 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

My “Eye On Art” column appears monthly in the Sag Harbor Express<\/em><\/h3>\n

__________________<\/p>\n

Franz Kline’s Roadster Reborn<\/h3>\n

12-4-2014<\/p>\n

\"The
The 1931 Lincoln roadster at Maggrett Auto Body, 1960.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the winter of 1960, William McCleery learned that the Old Whaler\u2019s Church was giving away a broken pump organ, so he and his wife Alice drove out to Sag Harbor from their home in Bay Shore to collect it. McCleery, a stationary engineer by profession and a serious tinkerer by inclination, thought he could get the organ working again. On a detour to Springs to visit his aunt, they drove past Maggrett Auto Body, on the highway in Wainscott. Ever on the lookout for an antique car restoration project, he spotted, as he put it, \u201ca diamond in the rough.\u201d It was a 1931 Lincoln roadster, and rough it certainly was. Sunk up to the axles in the mud, with rotting canvas and pitted chrome, the car had zero curb appeal, plus it didn\u2019t run. The owner, an artist, had more or less abandoned it in 1957, after a botched engine replacement. These negatives deterred McCleery not a bit. On the positive side, the price was $150. He promptly laid out a $15 deposit.<\/p>\n

Turned out the owner was none other than Franz Kline, who lived in the city and used it only when he came out East. He had bought it in 1954, when he, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Ludwig Sander and Nancy Ward (Kline\u2019s girlfriend at the time) rented the Red House on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton for a summer that has since become the stuff of legend. As Elaine later recalled, \u201cIt was a kind of pleasant but nightmarish summer, parties every night, entertaining in the way a nightmare could be entertaining\u2026 There is such a thing as too many friends, too much talk, too much booze, too much of a good thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kline had never owned a car, but he had a hankering for one, so he went up to the DMV in Riverhead and got a learner\u2019s permit. You could argue that wheels are practical in the country, but the Lincoln was an impressive machine, much more than just a convenience. Kline\u2019s friend, the publisher Barney Rosset, said it looked \u201clike a steam locomotive.\u201d With a powerful V8 engine, dual carbs, and handsome LeBaron coachwork, the K-series convertible coup\u00e9 was a luxury car in its day. According to McCleery, only 275 of them were produced. It had a price tag of nearly $5,000 new, at a time when the average annual income was $1,850. Kline had paid only $150 for it, and he was eager to show it off. When his pal Jackson Pollock dropped by the Red House, they decided to take it for a spin.<\/p>\n

In an essay for my anthology, \u201cSuch Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock,\u201d Rosset described what happened next:<\/p>\n

\u201cHe and Pollock took it out on the road and hit more or less the first car coming toward them, head on. \u2026 Kline had to appear in court for demolishing the other car, which had about six people in it, uninjured, thank goodness. Franz said the only thing he owned was his Lincoln, and he was afraid the judge would take it away from him, so I agreed to buy it.\u201d Fortunately the judge let Kline off with a warning, \u201cso I gave Franz back the gorgeous car and he returned my $150 check.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"William
William McCleery with the restored car, November 2014.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The car was a long way down from gorgeous when McCleery got it, but he saw its potential and spent the next ten years restoring it. One crucial missing part, the distinctive greyhound radiator cap, made by Gorham, was still in Kline\u2019s possession, so McCleery went to his studio on 14th<\/sup> Street to retrieve it. The artist was apologetic: he couldn\u2019t find it, but he knew it was around somewhere, and invited McCleery to search the place. It turned up in a closet, in what he thinks was an empty liquor box. Other original features, including the V8 engine, were swapped out from a parts car. His wife sewed the canvas top and spare wheel covers, and their son and daughter pitched in as well, until the Lincoln was finally ready for the road in 1971. Sadly, Kline didn\u2019t live to see its rebirth. He died of a heart condition in 1962, just shy of his 52nd<\/sup> birthday.<\/p>\n

Thanks to a tip from Tony Pepitone, an in-law of McCleery\u2019s, I contacted him to verify that he really did own Franz Kline\u2019s car. Not only did he tell me the story and show me the documentation, but after a delicious lunch prepared by Alice he took me for a ride around the neighborhood. Sitting where Pollock sat on that storied day in 1954, I was glad that McCleery is a much better driver than Kline was.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Krasner and Lewis in Context<\/h3>\n

11-6-2014<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard it said that the art world is like an athletic competition: there are many players, but only a few winners. In art as in sports, the top finishers get to stand on the podium, while the rest are relegated to the sidelines. Leaf through back issues of Art News and you\u2019ll find legions of them. \u201cFrom the Margins,\u201d an exhibition (through February 1) at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, focuses on two from among that multitude, and I wish the show had made it clear that they were far from the only ones. The so-called margins around the central few were very wide indeed.<\/p>\n

\"Norman
Norman Lewis, “Self-Portrait,” 1939. \u00a0 Wax pastel and gouache on paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The two artists in question, Lee Krasner and Norman Lewis, came of age in the 1930s, when they were on the WPA Federal Art Project payroll. Among its many virtues, the project was non-discriminatory, and it paid a living wage. Krasner, born in Brooklyn to immigrant Jewish parents, rose to the rank of supervisor, directing a team of artists that included her future husband, Jackson Pollock\u2014in 1942 she was his boss. Lewis, an African-American, taught at the Harlem Community Art Center under WPA auspices. Like so many of their contemporaries, they matured in this non-competitive, non-commercial art world, where your sex and your skin color were immaterial.<\/p>\n

All that changed after World War II, when the art market began to recover from the Depression and American artists claimed territory that had been reserved for the European avant-garde. Both Krasner and Lewis took advantage of that shift. Krasner, who first showed her Little Image abstractions at Guild Hall in 1949, had been active in the American Abstract Artists group. In 1950 Lewis participated in an important two-day conference, known as \u201cArtists Sessions at Studio 35,\u201d with most of the major players in the Abstract Expressionist movement. Although Lewis was the only artist of color on the panel, there were a few women. The pecking order had not yet been established, and the movement embraced a wide range of styles and approaches.<\/p>\n

\"Lee
Lee Krasner with an early version of “Stop and Go,” ca. 1949.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

From 1949 to 1964, Lewis was represented by the Willard Gallery, a prestigious venue that also showed Morris Graves, Mark Tobey and David Smith. Krasner had her first solo show in 1951 at the well-respected Betty Parsons Gallery, which also represented Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman. Her second was in 1955 at the Stable Gallery, a showcase for advanced contemporary art. Not slouchy, as she would have said. But in spite of these achievements and associations, neither Krasner nor Lewis got to stand on the AbEx podium, which was reserved for a small cadre of white males. Plenty of other white males were also excluded, so it can\u2019t be chalked up entirely to art-world sexism and racism, although those factors undeniably played significant parts. But how much did it have to do with the art, rather than the artists?<\/p>\n

The Jewish Museum show posits that both Krasner and Lewis were outside the artistic mainstream during the period in question, 1945-1952. Neither of them painted the big, bold gestural abstractions or color-field canvases that were grabbing the attention of curators, critics and collectors. Yet like their more celebrated peers, both created all-over abstract compositions using spontaneously generated imagery. They shared an interest in jazz, with its syncopated rhythms and reliance on improvisation, and in linear forms, often interwoven, as in Lewis\u2019 1947 canvas, \u201cTwilight Sounds\u201d (note its kinship to Tobey\u2019s calligraphic style), and Krasner\u2019s Little Image paintings, like \u201cBlack and White Squares, No. 1\u201d 1948. In terms of quality, works like these certainly hold their own with those from the same period by A-listers like Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Ad Reinhardt, who were also working in small to medium-size formats.<\/p>\n

\"Norman
Norman Lewis, “Twilight Sounds,” 1947. Oil on canvas, 23 1\/3 x 28 ins.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Lee
Lee Krasner, “Black and White Squares, No. 1,” 1948. Oil and enamel on linen, 24 x 30 ins.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So how marginal were Krasner and Lewis? In the past couple of decades, scholars and collectors have taken a broader view of mid-century American abstraction\u2014the scholars recognizing that many excellent painters who were very much part of the movement have been overlooked and undervalued, and the collectors reacting to the inflated prices for paintings by the artists Krasner called the \u201cbig boys.\u201d To return to the sports simile, you see a lot more talent if you widen the field.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

American Today, Or Was It?<\/h3>\n

10-9-2014<\/p>\n

\""Changing
“Changing West,” “Midwest,” and part of “Deep South,” sections of Benton’s mural at the New School in 1971, when the boardroom was used as a classroom.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In his autobiography, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975) wrote that his purpose was to create a truly American art with \u201crecognizable American meanings.\u201d To that end, in the 1920s he crisscrossed the country, recording his observations in countless sketches of rural and urban life. They are the raw material of his 10-panel mural cycle, \u201cAmerica Today,\u201d painted in 1930-31 for the boardroom of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. Equitable Life purchased the mural in 1984, and 28 years later the insurance company donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It has now been installed in a custom-built room, Gallery 746 in the Met\u2019s American Wing, where visitors can judge how well Benton lived up to his principles.<\/p>\n

The exhibition, on view through April 15 (after which the mural will reportedly move to another location), includes many of Benton\u2019s related drawings and preliminary studies. A selection of examples from the Met\u2019s collection puts his work in context, from its formal roots in 16th<\/sup> century European Mannerist painting to its kinship with Reginald Marsh and John Steuart Curry, other so-called realists of the period, and its antipathy to the modernism of Stuart Davis and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. Most telling, however, are the photographs by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, James Van Der Zee and others chronicling the onset of the Great Depression, which was just taking hold as Benton\u2019s mural was installed.<\/p>\n

\"Detail
Detail of “Steel,” from “America Today.” Jackson Pollock, Benton’s student at the time, reportedly posed for the foreground figure of the steelworker.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

No sooner was \u201cAmerican Today\u201d unveiled than it prompted a storm of disapproval, both on aesthetic grounds and for its subject matter. The art critics disliked Benton\u2019s sinewy, sometimes grotesquely articulated figures, more like caricatures than character studies. His curious use of molding strips to separate areas of disparate imagery was likened to cheap tabloid layouts\u2014a criticism Benton embraced. Objections to his content were centered on the fact that he had focused on the picturesque aspects of America, ignoring the hardship that was a more honest reflection of contemporary life. He depicted the vigor of industry and the bounty of agriculture, not the idle factories and foreclosed farms. The city scenes teem with gyrating dancers, prizefighters and circus performers. In speakeasies, at the movies, even at a revival meeting, everyone seems to be having a fine old time. Only as his mural was being completed did Benton add a reference to the bread lines that were an increasingly evident reality.<\/p>\n

Benton dismissed the carping from left-wingers and those he felt were out of touch with grass-roots America, but even some of his supporters questioned the mural\u2019s premise. His art dealer, Alma Reed, considered it dated, reflecting a bygone era of prosperity. The New School\u2019s progressive director, Alvin Johnson, who had commissioned it, complained that Benton pictured \u201cthe gigantic inhuman machinery of industrialism with never a pathetic note for the wage slaves operating it.\u201d To be fair, the artist did treat coal mining as a hellish occupation, but the farmers, dockworkers and other manual laborers are going at it with gusto. The strikes by textile workers and farm workers that were then in the news are literally out of the picture.<\/p>\n

\""Deep
“Deep South,” left, and “City Activities with Subway,” in the Met’s installation.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, more than 80 years after it was painted, how does \u201cAmerica Today\u201d stack up, both as art and as a reflection of Benton\u2019s aims? The installation recreates the boardroom\u2019s original dimensions and uses sympathetic lighting to bring out the mural\u2019s best features, with a helpful little text panel for each section. Viewers can relate directly to the life-size figures and get a good look at the many intriguing details and clever juxtapositions, like the dancer\u2019s derri\u00e8re cheek by jowl, so to speak, with the preacher\u2019s head. In the Equitable Building\u2019s lobby the panels were rearranged, hung too high and lighted too brightly, emphasizing the figures\u2019 flaws\u2014the gangly arms, outsize feet and awkward poses that Benton\u2019s detractors scorned. And notwithstanding his claim that he was creating a genuinely American art, his style and technique are European in origin. This country\u2019s true indigenous art is not in the Met\u2019s Gallery 746, but in Gallery 356, Native Art of North America.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Color at the Clark<\/h3>\n

9-11-2014<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re among the folks who jump in the car and head north when the first red leaf appears on the Bay Street maples, you need to know that Williamstown, Massachusetts, will be having an exceptionally colorful fall. After enjoying the annual foliage display in the nearby Berkshire Hills, which peaks in early October, those in search of chromatic delights are advised to visit the Clark Art Institute, where \u201cRaw Color,\u201d a selection of painted sculptures and related spray paintings by David Smith, is on view through October 29.<\/p>\n

Together with Alexander Calder, Smith (1906-1965) was a 20th<\/sup> century pioneer of welded metal sculpture. But while Calder routinely painted his mobiles and stabiles in bright primary colors, Smith is best known for steel constructions that are either brush-polished or have their natural metallic finish. Old tools, scrap metal and bits of mechanical detritus often found their way undisguised into his work. If a shape looks like a rusty wrench, it actually is a rusty wrench. Even the shiny cubes and rectangles are obviously welded metal. Such truth to materials was considered a hallmark of mid-century modernism, to the extent that after Smith\u2019s untimely death in an automobile accident, one of his executors, the critic Clement Greenberg, had the paint stripped from several of his pieces.<\/p>\n

\"David
David Smith’s photo of his painted sculptures in the field at Bolton Landing, early 1960s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But Smith himself was not such a purist. Originally trained as a painter, he turned to sculpture in 1933, drawing on his early experience as a riveter in a Studebaker plant. As early as 1938, when he had his first solo sculpture show, he was painting some of his metal pieces. After he moved to a farm in Bolton Landing, New York\u2014less than 100 miles from the Clark\u2014he began peppering the property with examples of his work, some polychromed and some plain metal. In the early 1960s he executed a group of flat circular pieces painted in what he described as raw color\u2014institutional green, school bus yellow, and other industrial hues. Known as the Circle series, they were installed in a row on the grounds. Each piece framed the next one in turn, establishing their relationship to one another and contrasting sharply with the natural tones of the surrounding landscape.<\/p>\n

\"Installation
Installation of four pieces from Smith’s Circle series, in “Raw Color,” at the Lunder Center.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The current installation, in the Clark\u2019s Lunder Center at Stone Hill, aims to recreate that effect, or at least that\u2019s the billing. It is not, however, the result. Four of the Circles are said to be lined up as they were in the Bolton Landing field, but they\u2019re in a clean white gallery inside the building, not out on the lawn interacting with nature. Even Primo Piano III,<\/i> the one piece that\u2019s outdoors, sits on the building\u2019s pristine patio. I think they all look just fine, but let\u2019s not pretend that, as the curator would have us believe, the installation tells us \u201chow Smith approached the eternal problem of how to deal with nature.\u201d What it does show is that, in addition to his genius for formal invention, Smith had a remarkable gift as a colorist.<\/p>\n

\"Al
Al Loving, “Brownie, Sunny, Dave and Al,” 1972. Mixed media. In “Make it New,” at the Clark Center.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If you get to the Clark before October 13, you can also take in another colorful show, \u201cMake it New,\u201d a group of abstract paintings on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Installed in the brand new Clark Center, the museum\u2019s impressive special exhibition venue, the show spans the years 1950-1975 and features some of the treasures displaced by the renovation of the National Gallery\u2019s east wing. Jackson Pollock\u2019s 1950 masterpiece, Lavender Mist,<\/i> provides the chronological starting point, as well as the anchor of a mini-survey of Abstract Expressionism, featuring equally impressive canvases by Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, Barnett Newman and Franz Kline. Moving on to subcategories devoted to shape, color and texture, the show ranges widely while staying within the boundaries of abstraction, mainly domestic but also imported. Even David Smith gets into the act, with Primo Piano II,<\/i> another painted piece from 1962, in the entrance court. Not as colorful as some of the neighboring canvases, it still looks right at home among the abstract paintings.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Motherwell in East Hampton<\/h3>\n

8-14-2014<\/p>\n

Although Robert Motherwell spent relatively little time living and working in East Hampton, his brief tenure had a major impact on his artistic development, his personal life, and the history of the area\u2019s creative community. That legacy is the subject of \u201cRobert Motherwell: The East Hampton Years, 1944-1952,\u201d on view through October 13 at Guild Hall. Organized by guest curator Phyllis Tuchman, the exhibition brings together choice examples, some of them rarely seen. It spans the period when Motherwell first summered in Amagansett, hanging out with the \u201cartists in exile\u201d who were displaced by the war, through his residency in a custom-built modernist house in Georgica (demolished in 1985), to his last East Hampton summer.<\/p>\n

\"Motherwell
Motherwell in his Georgica house, designed by Pierre Chareau in 1946. Photograph by Hans Namuth, 1950.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Born in 1915 in Aberdeen, Washington, son of the president of Wells Fargo Bank, Motherwell was educated at Stanford, Harvard and Columbia, and also studied in France. With his father\u2019s financial support, he studied literature, philosophy and art history, as well as studio art. Exempt from military service due to asthma, he was in New York when the European \u00e9migr\u00e9s arrived, and he soon attached himself to the Surrealist contingent. In 1944, when several of them decamped to eastern Long Island for the summer, he followed. He and his wife Maria rented in Amagansett for $35 a month; among their neighbors were John Cage, Stanley William Hayter, Jean H\u00e9lion, and Max Ernst. Harold Rosenberg, the influential critic with whom Motherwell edited the journal Possibilities, had already bought a place nearby on Neck Path.<\/p>\n

While working on his first solo show, scheduled for that fall, Motherwell met the French architect Pierre Chareau, who would later design the artist\u2019s controversial house and studio. In the meantime, he and Maria moved to East Hampton village for the fall, and when his show opened at Art of This Century in late October it included several paintings and collages made in East Hampton. Unfortunately none of them are in the current exhibition, but it does include \u201cIn Beige with Sand,\u201d painted in East Hampton in late 1945, when they rented a cottage near Georgica Pond. Motherwell later said that the palette, with tentative sprinklings of beach sand embedded in the paint, was inspired by \u201cthe sand and sea in winter.\u201d He also described the glowing red-orange of his 1947 collage painting, \u201cThe Poet,\u201d as akin to \u201cthe reddened and angry sky\u201d he observed on a winter\u2019s day on the Long Island coast.<\/p>\n

\"Robert
Robert Motherwell, \u201cPortrait of Maria,\u201d 1948. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
\u00a9 Estate of Robert Motherwell \/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In 1946 Motherwell bought two acres of land in Georgica and commissioned Chareau to design a house and a separate studio, using army surplus Quonset huts. (Oddly, although the studio is discussed, it\u2019s not pictured in either the catalog or the show\u2019s documentary section. See the 1956 drawing below.) Needless to say, the neighbors in their shingled cottages were not amused by the corrugated metal half-tubes, and the artist, who thought the prefab design would be inexpensive, was dismayed by the cost overruns. The new digs also proved to have a negative effect on his already rocky marriage. His wife felt isolated there, and in 1948 they moved back to the city. A painting from that period, \u201cPortrait of Maria,\u201d is a telling psychological study in which her figure is reduced to a decorative dress pattern surmounted by a featureless, diamond-shaped head in a pall of darkness. That winter Maria left him.<\/p>\n

\"Plan
Elevation of the Motherwell studio, 1946, with residential addition by Robert Rosenberg, 1956<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This troubled period also saw the emergence of what would become Motherwell\u2019s signature image. To illustrate a poem by Rosenberg, intended for the second (unpublished) issue of Possibilities, he sketched the black verticals and ovoids that established the basis for his Spanish Elegies. In the first painted version, a small work on paper from 1948-49 titled \u201cAt Five in the Afternoon,\u201d the ominous forms are recast as a response to Garcia Lorca\u2019s lament on the death of a matador. Such literary associations, both direct and oblique, run through Motherwell\u2019s entire oeuvre. \u201cThe Voyage,\u201d for example, takes its title from a Baudelaire poem, and \u201cUlysses,\u201d 1947-51, and \u201cThe Homely Protestant,\u201d 1948, both reference James Joyce.<\/p>\n

Motherwell rented out the Georgica house until late 1949, when he returned with Betty Little, who would become his second wife. Sadly, Chareau, who lived on the grounds, died suddenly the following August, and Motherwell felt the loss of his friend so deeply that he never worked in the Quonset hut studio again. He sold the property to Barney Rosset in 1953. But while his time in East Hampton was limited and intermittent, it marked the creation of his first mature works and his early recognition as a pivotal figure in the emerging New York School\u2014the term he coined to define the postwar vanguard.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Prellwitz Legacy<\/h3>\n

7-17-2014<\/p>\n

When Wendy Prellwitz was a little girl, she spent summers with her family on the North Fork at High House, overlooking Little Peconic Bay, where her great-grandparents, the painters Henry and Edith Prellwitz, had his-and-hers studios. She remembers her enchantment with the many paintings by both artists that were still there, and her fascination with the diaries and photographs that documented the artists\u2019 community of which they were a vital part. Now, seventy years after their deaths, Wendy finds ideas for her own paintings and prints in the same locale that inspired her ancestors. Examples of her recent work are on view through July 28th<\/sup> at the South Street Gallery in Greenport.<\/p>\n

\"Edith
Edith Prellwitz, “Entrance to Peconic Bay,” 1902. Oil on canvas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Like its South Fork counterpart, the North Fork art colony attracted artists based in New York City because of its ready access by rail, as well as its natural beauty. Edith and Henry began visiting the area in the early 20th<\/sup> century and moved to Peconic in 1913, joining colleagues like Irving Wiles, Edward Bell, and Benjamin and Harriet Fitz, who were already established there, and William Steeple Davis, an Orient native. They lived in High House year-round for over a decade, during which they focused on views of their immediate surroundings\u2014the coastal scenery, sailboats on the bay, the fishing fleet in the harbor\u2014at all times of day, and in all seasons. Their property has stayed in the family, and with Wendy Prellwitz in residence the studio building is once again filled with creative activity.<\/p>\n

During her career as an architect, with a practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Wendy nurtured her early aptitude for painting and drawing and is now<\/p>\n

\"Wendy
Wendy Prellwitz, “Departure #4,” 2014. Oil and acrylic on paper.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

concentrating on visual art full time. Her childhood attraction to Edith and Henry\u2019s maritime subject matter is reflected in her own imagery, but not literally. She starts from a similar place, but takes the impulse in a different, more personal direction. Instead of simulating natural elements in the impressionist style favored by<\/p>\n

her ancestors, Wendy uses visual metaphors to evoke them. The wavy grain of wooden boards\u2014actually rubbings from the steps leading to her Cambridge studio\u2014becomes a stand-in for rippling water and\/or cloud-streaked sky, and works equally well as either one. Reflections are achieved by translucent layering, which is especially effective in her monotypes, with their complex multiple overprintings.<\/p>\n

A recurring motif is a dock near the Prellwitz property that juts out into the bay. Wendy made one painting of it that\u2019s a fairly straightforward study, but it seems like a way to get the observation out of her system and move into more challenging interpretive territory. In \u201cDeparture,\u201d the dock\u2019s planks and pilings are clearly indicated, although schematically, leading the eye across the water toward Jessup Neck and the North Sea coastline. In other paintings, including \u201cDeparture #4\u201d and \u201cComing and Going,\u201d the dock is reduced to a linear outline or chromatic area. The departure and return are optical rather than actual, so the travel from place to place that the titles suggest is accomplished in the viewer\u2019s imagination. The illumination, which could be reflected sunlight or moonlight, depending on your mood, enhances the ambiguity.<\/p>\n

In an article in last October\u2019s Fine Art Connoisseur magazine, Wendy Prellwitz considered her relationship to her forebears in terms of their shared enthusiasm for the Peconic environment. She described her fascination with \u201cthe reflections, the ever-changing, unknowable light,\u201d and the pleasure of painting outdoors \u201cin every season and in all weathers.\u201d One can imagine her great-grandmother jotting similar observations in her diary nearly a century ago.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“Degenerate Art” Revisited<\/h3>\n

6-19-2014<\/p>\n

\"Ernst
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, “A Group of Artists (Die Br\u00fccke),” 1926-27.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the same time as Futurism\u2014the subject of my column last month\u2014was challenging the academy in Italy, Expressionism was Germany\u2019s answer to hidebound artistic conservatism. The Expressionists used formal distortion and unnatural coloration to go beyond surface appearance to expose the inner truth of a subject, as they saw it. Forward-looking private collectors and museum curators embraced this bold new approach, and works by members of Die Br\u00fccke in Dresden, Der Blaue Reiter in Munich, and the Berlin Secession entered prestigious collections all over Germany. Even the National Socialists, who came to power in 1933, were favorably disposed at first.<\/p>\n

But Europe\u2019s avant-garde was imperiled by the rise of totalitarian regimes. In Italy, as we have seen, Futurism was tolerated, if not supported, by Mussolini\u2019s Fascist dictatorship, but it was a different story in Hitler\u2019s Germany. The Nazi response to modernism was to ban it, burn it, and ridicule it in a series of exhibitions that labeled the artists as decadent or insane. Many of them were persecuted or driven into exile. That shameful episode in the devastating history of Nazi atrocities is the subject of \u201cDegenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937,\u201d on view through September 1 at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. Its overlap with the Futurism show at the nearby Guggenheim is a fortunate coincidence.<\/p>\n

Smaller and more focused that the 1991 show on this subject in Los Angeles, the Neue Galerie\u2019s overview is a fascinating and chilling glimpse of the systematic campaign to rid German art of corrupting influences. The purge extended to film, theater and literature as well\u2014pictures of book-burnings are standard fare in documentaries about the Nazis\u2014but paintings and sculptures were especially vulnerable. Confiscated from museums, they were crammed into makeshift galleries in Munich\u2019s Hofgarten and presented as a \u201cchamber of horrors.\u201d The current show includes a selection of the survivors from the 1937 display, which featured more than 700 of the estimated 20,000 pieces that ultimately were seized.<\/p>\n

\u201cEntartete Kunst,\u201d as the show was billed, opened a day after Hitler\u2019s spanking new German House of the Arts\u2014the first example of Nazi architecture\u2014premiered with a lavish display of officially sanctioned art. One of the Neue Galerie\u2019s rooms contains works from both shows. An especially apt juxtaposition is Max Beckmann\u2019s haunting allegorical triptych, \u201cThe Departure,\u201d on loan from MoMA, side by side with Adolph Ziegler\u2019s triptych, \u201cThe Four Elements,\u201d a saccharine celebration of ideal German womanhood in pseudo-classical guise.\u00a0 The contrast between the retarditaire Nazi paradigm and the powerful emotional impact of Beckmann\u2019s images is striking. \u00a0And don\u2019t miss the room on the second floor where the empty frames of lost or destroyed paintings surround the original ledger that documents, on neatly typed pages, the items that were sold off to enrich the Nazi war machine.<\/p>\n

\"Emil
Emil Nolde, “Red-Haired Girl,” 1919.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Although only six of the 112 artists in the \u201cEntartete Kunst\u201d show were Jewish, all the work was denounced as reflecting a \u201cperverse Jewish spirit,\u201d an ominous warning that modernists would be subject to the same fate as their Jewish colleagues. They lost their jobs, were hounded by the authorities, and many simply left town. Paul Klee, an early casualty, had already moved to Switzerland in 1933. Oskar Kokoschka fled to Prague the following year. Beckmann left for Amsterdam the day after the Munich show opened. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a founder of Die Br\u00fccke, killed himself in 1938. Even Nazi Party membership was no protection. Emil Nolde, whose work had earlier been praised by Hitler\u2019s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, was a party member and strong supporter of the regime, yet more of his works were confiscated than those of any other artist, and after 1941 he was actually forbidden to paint.<\/p>\n

And what did he and his fellow modernists paint, model and carve that made the Nazis so hostile? The current sampling ranges from what now look like innocuous landscapes and still lifes to grotesquely distorted figures that still challenge our sensibilities. To the Nazis, however, they were dangerous alternatives to the weird amalgam of Aryan-Greco-Roman-Germanic aesthetics that represented their concepts of classic beauty and racial purity. Ironically, Hitler\u2019s \u201cGreat Exhibition of German Art,\u201d promoting those ideals, was far less popular than \u201cDegenerate Art,\u201d which attracted two million visitors to its Munich venue alone. Like the Hofgarten in 1937, the Neue Galerie has a line waiting to get in, this time not to mock the art but to admire it.<\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

Back to Futurism<\/h3>\n

5-22-2014<\/p>\n

\"Fortunato
Fortunato Depero, “Stormy Patriotic Marinetti: Psychological Portrait,” 1924. Oil on canvas, in artist’s frame.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cWe will glorify war\u2014the world\u2019s only hygiene\u2014militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.\u201d<\/p>\n

With those words, published in Le Figaro in 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti announced the birth of Futurism, a literary movement that soon embraced all the arts in its fervid grip. Reading a translation of its founding manifesto on the wall of the Guggenheim Museum\u2014where \u201cItalian Futurism 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,\u201d is on view through September 1\u2014you might dismiss the Futurists as a bunch of pompous misogynistic cranks. To be sure, the movement has long been marginalized as politically na\u00efve and aesthetically weak. This exhibition, the first comprehensive survey ever mounted in the US, asks us to take a longer and more nuanced look at how the Futurists envisioned a civilization remade according to their principles.<\/p>\n

Like last year\u2019s brilliant Gutai exhibition at the Guggenheim, the current show delves into all aspects of its subject, from its revolutionary pronouncements and free-form poetry to painting, sculpture, photography, performance, urban planning, and design of utilitarian objects. It traces Futurism\u2019s inception, in response to what the avant-garde perceived as an ossified, retrograde culture, through its various phases to its demise with the death of Marinetti. However misguided the Futurist worldview proved to be, this show finally gives the movement the full treatment it deserves. Far from glossing over its unsavory aspects, it presents them in the context of the political, social and artistic upheavals that shaped the first half of the 20th<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n

The contradictions are evident from day one. The Futurists worshiped speed, especially mechanized speed, which symbolized modernity, but failed to express it effectively in their art. The first gallery highlights Umberto Boccioni\u2019s sculpture, which aims to capture dynamic movement in a static medium and predictably misses the mark. Painters also tried unsuccessfully to depict motion optically without actual animation. In works by Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carr\u00e0, Gino Severini and others, racing cyclists, galloping horses, speeding cars and trains, a violinist sawing away at his instrument, all come to a screeching halt on canvas. Why didn\u2019t the artists use cinema, a new, mechanical medium that actually could capture movement, and lacked the imprimatur of the despised museums? Instead, they chose the traditional media long enshrined in the very institutions they attacked.<\/p>\n

\"Alessandro
Alessandro Bruschetti, “Fascist Synthesis,” 1935. Oil on canvas.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

With the advent of World War I, the Futurists\u2019 dream of armed conflict as a tool of cultural renewal became instead the grim reality of destruction, misery, and death, which claimed three of them. In the aftermath, Marinetti formed a tenuous alliance with Benito Mussolini\u2019s Fascist party, which came to power in 1922. Although he had formally renounced their association, Marinetti had a change of heart; he and his associates praised Il Duce and courted his favor. The most blatantly pandering example is Alessandro Bruschetti\u2019s \u201cFascist Synthesis,\u201d a 1935 triptych that glorifies Mussolini\u2019s dictatorship. Under his rule Futurism was tolerated but never adopted as the official art that its promoters envisioned. This association has long tainted the appreciation of the movement\u2019s interwar phase, to the extent that few works from that time have ever been seen in this country, until now.<\/p>\n

\"Benedetta,
Benedetta, \u201cSynthesis of Communications,\u201d 1933-34. Conference room, Palazzo delle Poste, Palermo.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Another paradox is Futurism\u2019s bias against women. Notwithstanding the virile posturing of its 1909 manifesto, it attracted several female members, notably Benedetta Cappa, who became Marinetti\u2019s wife. Ironically, given the earnestness with which the macho Futurists pursued the macho Mussolini, the most important commission they ever got from his regime went to Benedetta, as she was known professionally. Her impressive 1933-34 murals for the Palermo post office\u2019s conference room, painstakingly removed from the building and installed in their own gallery at the top of the Guggenheim\u2019s ramp, treat various aspects of communication by airplane (a favorite Futurist subject), ship, rail, telegraph, telephone and radio. Unlike some of the more pretentious efforts of her male colleagues, they succeed in celebrating modern technology symbolically, instead of trying in vain to simulate its effects.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Ray Johnson’s Guessing Games<\/h3>\n

4-24-2014<\/p>\n

When Ray Johnson drowned in Sag Harbor Cove on the night of January 13, 1995, he committed the ultimate act of performance art. His suicide at the age of 67\u2014while in good health, and financially solvent\u2014remains unexplained. One thing is certain: that\u2019s how he wanted it. After all, in both his art and his life, Ray invited speculation, so is it any wonder that he keeps us guessing posthumously?<\/p>\n

The game continues at Baruch College\u2019s Sidney Mishkin Gallery on East 22nd<\/sup> Street in Manhattan, where a selection of Ray\u2019s collages is on view through May 7. Spanning four decades, the show illustrates his signature use of free association and word play, combined with an eccentric graphic style, to create fascinating, mystifying, amusing, and sometimes disturbing imagery. That many of them are also quite beautiful is, I think, often overlooked in the effort to decipher their meaning. The quirkiness and deliberate cartoon-like quality of his drawings masks an aesthetic refinement that is most apparent from a distance. Once you get drawn in and start trying to decode them, you can get lost in the woods of Ray\u2019s omnivorous imagination.<\/p>\n

\"\u201cUntitled
\u201cUntitled (Golf Balls with Brick Snake),\u201d ca. 1970-86. Collage on Masonite, 16 x 16 inches. \u00a9 The Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That said, it\u2019s hard to make a wrong turn. Like the Dada and Symbolist poets he admired, Ray leads you in multiple directions at once, all of them fruitful. Although some of the references are very personal, especially when a piece is inscribed or dedicated to one of his friends, the visual puns may still carry beyond the in-joke level. To help the perplexed viewer, a few of the examples on view come with explanations, which are only somewhat useful. For instance, in the wall label that accompanies \u201cUntitled (Golf Balls with Brick Snake),\u201d with which Ray reportedly tinkered over a 15-year period, we are told that the repeated face is that of Betty Boop, a cartoon character he often referenced. But the faces bear the name Abby Friedman, the wife of the writer B.H. Friedman, and she isn\u2019t mentioned in the gallery\u2019s text. So why does Abby get Betty\u2019s face? Perhaps because the two B\u2019s in her name match the two B\u2019s in Betty Boop. That\u2019s how Ray\u2019s mind worked.<\/p>\n

A goggle-eyed bunny head, Ray\u2019s iconic image and surrogate, casts a baleful glance at the pair of golf balls, which sport eyelashes that echo Betty\/Abby\u2019s, drawing the analogy between golf balls and eyeballs. The snake, another frequently repeated motif, makes three appearances. Two are inscribed with Ray\u2019s name, and the brick one\u2014now there\u2019s a contradictory idea\u2014is named Jim Rosenquist. A quartet of silhouette masks, identified as Edward Albee, flank the bunny head. As a professional name-dropper Ray had no equal, and the fact that his own signature appears several<\/p>\n

\""Untitled
“Untitled (SALE, Ceci n’est pas un pipe),” 1974\/1986\/1991. Acrylic, ink and collage, 15 x 15 inches. \u00a9 The Ray Johnson Estate, courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

times in reverse tells you that he\u2019s the one behind this elaborate casting call. Other examples, like \u201cSALE,\u201d are even more complex, with references to Ren\u00e9 Magritte, Luis Bu\u00f1uel, Geraldine Chaplin doing a backbend, soft-core gay porn and numerous other unrelated elements, jumbled together inside and around a silhouette profile of the artist William Condon\u2019s head, as if his thoughts\u2014are they dirty? That\u2019s what \u201csale\u201d means in French\u2014had suddenly become visible.<\/p>\n

Writing about Ray’s art is difficult, because each image has multiple meanings. What I see may not be what you see. It\u2019s all about connections, one thing leading to another, and if you let your eyes and your mind wander freely you can make your own links. Ray actively promoted this through his New York Correspondence School, in which drawings and collages were exchanged, altered, and forwarded by mail. It was a sendup of the New York School of abstract painters who dominated the art world when he first came to the city in 1949, fresh from Black Mountain College. Rather than working alone in the studio, Ray collaborated with his correspondents. Instead of meeting in person at The Club, he connected vicariously through the US Postal Service. When Happenings were all the rage, he staged Nothings. There wasn\u2019t a trend he didn\u2019t love to buck. Even his reclusiveness was contradictory, since he kept in constant touch with a wide circle of friends, admirers, and fellow artists via telephone and letter. If he had lived, not doubt we\u2019d now be inundated by his emails, and his Facebook page would be off the charts.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mural Gets a Makeover<\/h3>\n

3-27-2014<\/p>\n

You might think that we already know all there is to know about Jackson Pollock\u2019s life and work, but you\u2019d be wrong. For example, before Pollock\u2019s 1943 mural arrived at Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, it had acquired a coating of varnish, as well as a heavy overlay of myth, both of which made it difficult to see the painting properly. Now, after more than 18 months of analysis and treatment, it has emerged from under its literal and figurative shrouds.<\/p>\n

Anyone who doubts Pollock\u2019s compositional and technical skills should study this canvas\u2014at 8 x 20 feet, the largest he ever painted\u2014on view at the Getty Center through June 1, after which it will travel. A tour de force of vibrant brushwork (this was before his signature pouring technique was fully developed), dynamic abstract rhythms and vivid colors, it signals his breakthrough after years of struggling to find his own direction. Like his hero, the Mexican muralist Jos\u00e9 Clemente Orozco, and his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, Pollock wanted to paint big, bold pictures that could fill a room with energy. Thanks to his patron, Peggy Guggenheim, who commissioned the mural for the entrance hall of her Manhattan duplex, he was able to realize his ambition.<\/p>\n

\"Peggy
Peggy Guggenheim and Jackson Pollock with the mural in the entrance hall of her town house, ca. 1945
Photograph by George Carger<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Pollock was unknown in 1943, and Peggy took a big risk in promoting him. His drinking problem and emotional fragility were red flags, but a talent that MoMA\u2019s curator, James Johnson Sweeney, described as \u201cvolcanic\u201d was also obvious. In addition to the mural commission, Peggy signed him up for solo shows at her avant-garde gallery, Art of This Century, and gave him financial support. She bet on his potential, and was rewarded with the credit for launching his career, as well as a superb collection of his paintings. When she moved to Italy after World War II she gave several of them to museums around the country, from Rhode Island to Seattle, and took the rest with her.<\/p>\n

But the mural\u2014which was made to be portable, since she was only renting the town house\u2014was too big for her Venetian villa, and finding a home for it proved to be a challenge. There were no takers among the New York museums. Fortunately for the University of Iowa, the head of the art department learned that it was available and got it for the school. For years it hung in the art studio, but when the UI Museum of Art opened in 1969 it became the new building\u2019s centerpiece.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile the legend surrounding the mural grew and flourished. The story goes that after procrastinating for months, Pollock painted it in one furious burst of pent-up creative energy. He missed the deadline, so it wasn\u2019t delivered until January 1944, two months after it was due. It was too big for the hallway, so Marcel Duchamp cut eight inches off one end. Turns out none of this is true. Doubts began to arise when the painting was shown at MoMA in Pollock\u2019s 1998 retrospective, and it got its first major examination by conservators. There\u2019s no evidence that it was cut down, and it certainly wasn\u2019t painted in a single night.<\/p>\n

\"Pollock's
Pollock’s mural at the Getty Center
Photograph by Roy Nicholson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Conservation Institute\u2019s painstaking analysis, discussed and illustrated on the Getty Center Web site, confirms that each layer of oil paint had to dry before the next one was applied, a process that takes days, if not weeks. Plus the finished painting needed drying time before it was unstretched and rolled, the only way to get it out Pollock\u2019s studio door and into Peggy\u2019s hallway. And a recently discovered letter from Peggy says it was in place by early November 1943, right on schedule. So much for the image of an irresponsible, impulsive artist splashing it out in a panic.<\/p>\n

Looking at it now, without the 1973 varnish that dulled and flattened its surface, and cleverly re-stretched to disguise a slight sag caused by years on an inadequate support, it\u2019s obvious that the mural is a thoughtfully conceived, methodically executed masterpiece. In addition to restoring its aesthetic glory, the Getty has done it a great service by unpacking its phony baggage.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fred McDarrah’s Hungry Eye<\/h3>\n

2-27-2014<\/p>\n

\"Greenwich\u201cI was a groupie at heart,\u201d Fred W. McDarrah confessed, \u201cand my camera was my ticket of admission.\u201d It was also his meal ticket. As The Village Voice\u2019s picture editor, and for a long time the only staff photographer, Fred (who died in 2007 at 81) made his living documenting the downtown scene for more than four decades. The result is a huge body of work, estimated at some 35,000 images, from which a sampling is on view through March 8 at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. While it\u2019s a small percentage of Fred\u2019s total output, there are over 100 photos, many of which will be familiar to readers of his books on Greenwich Village, the art world, the gay pride movement, and the Beat Generation. In fact the exhibition\u2019s title, \u201cSave the Village,\u201d is drawn from a cover photo on his 1963 paperback, Greenwich Village,<\/i> showing the demolition of the sculptor Arnold Bergier\u2019s studio, which had those words painted on its fa\u00e7ade. Fifty-four years ago, when that building was torn down, the locals were already mourning the imminent demise of their historic neighborhoods, cheap lofts and far-out life styles.<\/p>\n

Fred, a Brooklyn boy, migrated to Manhattan after his Army service and studied journalism on the GI Bill at NYU, when Washington Square was, in his words, \u201cthe focus of intellectual and cultural activity.\u201d After graduating in 1954, he snagged a job as an ad salesman for the fledgling\u00a0 Voice, and soon became its photographer-in-residence. Starting with the beatniks, he chronicled the evolution of New York\u2019s bohemia, as well as its surrounding milieu. He hit the street just as the counterculture was warming up the Cold War climate, and the alternative press was providing a forum for innovations in art, theater, music, writing and film. For those of us who came of age in the city during those years, Fred\u2019s images are like the pictures in a family album. For those who weren\u2019t there (or were and can\u2019t remember), they conjure a time when, quoting Fred again, \u201cpainting, poetry, avant-garde performances and Off-Broadway theater were in full swing\u2014everybody was creating something.\u201d<\/p>\n

The statements I\u2019m quoting were written for an exhibition of Fred\u2019s Greenwich Village photographs at the Pollock-Krasner House in 1990. It was the first show I organized there. When Fred wasn\u2019t prowling the downtown byways, he and his wife Gloria retreated to a cottage on Three Mile Harbor Road, so they were the museum\u2019s not-too-distant neighbors. That was my excuse to prevail on him to share some of his favorite pictures. He was a pleasure to work with, patiently sorting and selecting material and carefully identifying the characters\u2014some famous or notorious, others now obscure\u2014captured in his iconic images. Several of them, and many more, populate the current exhibition. Their habitat ranges from the Cedar Bar, the Club, the Living Theater, the White Horse Tavern and Caf\u00e9 Wha? to Judson Church, the Factory and the Stonewall Inn, as well as the anti-war rallies, be-ins, Happenings and demonstrations that mark the Village as a legendary locus of political, social and artistic ferment.<\/p>\n

\"The
The Velvet Underground, Big Eye of Nico, April 1, 1966.
Courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery, New York<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fred never claimed that he was making art, but it can\u2019t be denied that some of his images rise above reportage. Jack Kerouac\u2019s impassioned reading from \u201cOn the Road,\u201d gesturing as if to embrace the whole audience, illuminates a dingy loft more brightly than the glaring light bulb overhead.\u00a0 A performance by the Velvet Underground casts the band as stark silhouettes against a projection of the singer Nico\u2019s eye\u2014an appropriately surreal backdrop for their visionary music. And a shot of a gay power rally, in which a banner obscures the marchers\u2019 faces, turns their singular embraces into universal gestures. There are also outstanding portraits of individuals, among them a gleeful Yayoi Kusama flashing her trademark dots; a trenchcoated Robert Rauschenberg lurking in an alley; Andy Warhol photographing Fred, as if each inveterate shutterbug were winking at the other; a grizzled Robert Moses, whose plan for a lower Manhattan expressway prompted bitter and ultimately successful opposition by Village denizens; Allen Ginsberg in an Uncle Sam hat, patriotically protesting the Vietnam War; and Bob Dylan earnestly saluting the camera. No doubt about it, Fred was in the right places at the right times, even as the times they were a-changin\u2019.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

HAH x 2<\/h3>\n

1-30-2014<\/p>\n

Ever since enterprising wreckers began luring merchant vessels onto the treacherous reefs around Key West, the so-called Conch Republic has been a magnet for creative thinkers. The island is best known for its colorful literary characters, from Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop and Tennessee Williams back in the day to contemporaries like Judy Blume, Alison Lurie and Joe Pintauro. It\u2019s less renowned for its visual artists, although they\u2019ve been drawn to its tropical climate and welcoming hospitality since 1832, when John James Audubon stopped at the Geiger house on Whitehead Street and fleshed out his \u201cBirds of America\u201d portfolio with novel specimens he spotted in the Geigers\u2019 garden.<\/p>\n

Today there\u2019s a lively art scene and several commercial galleries, including Key West\u2019s own Guild Hall, a co-op on the main drag, Duval Street. The former Custom House on Front Street is now a museum that shows both contemporary and historical art. At The Studios of Key West, in the old armory building, there\u2019s a full program of residencies, classes, lectures, exhibitions and performances. Sculpture Key West, which began in 1995 as an informal outdoor exhibition for local artists in Fort Zachary Taylor State Park, has become an annual public art showcase that attracts entrants from around the country and even overseas.<\/p>\n

Among the outstanding resident artists is Helen A. Harrison. No, I\u2019m not boasting, because although I\u2019ve been spending time in the Conch Republic for more than 20 years, it\u2019s not me I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n

My husband and I have returned several times since our first visit in 1989, when we stayed at a charming Victorian guesthouse, The Palms, on White Street. Almost directly across the way, in a modest storefront at the corner of Olivia, I spotted the Harrison Gallery. Peeking through its big picture window, I saw some things that made me want to take a closer look. It turned out to be one of the best showcases for contemporary art in a town that\u2019s burdened with more than its share of schlock houses and tourist traps. A bell tinkled as I opened the door, and a slim, attractive woman came out of the back room. I asked if she was the eponymous owner, and she said she was. I said, I\u2019m a Harrison too, Helen Harrison. \u201cSo am I,\u201d she said, \u201cHelen A. Harrison.\u201d Well, I\u2019ll be jiggered. \u201cAnd so am I,\u201d I told her.<\/p>\n

\"Helen
Helen and Ben Harrison in Helen\u2019s studio with her sculpture, \u201cCoral Head.\u201d See more of her work at harrison-gallery.com.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Piling one coincidence on another, the other HAH is a sculptor, which is what I was before going into museum work. In addition to carving wood, she uses natural materials like Cohuna Palm fronds and Royal Poinciana seed pods that she manipulates in ways that both enhance and disguise their botanical character. She might build up contours with metal mesh or fiberglas, cover the surfaces with glossy enamel paint and gold leaf, and add geometric stone or wood elements as counterpoints to the organic undulations. She respects the inherent quality of the material, but isn\u2019t intimidated by it, and often pushes it beyond its apparent limits. Her shoe-shaped carvings turn functional forms into works of art, while her vessels and furniture are as useful as they are sculptural.<\/p>\n

Helen and her husband Ben, a musician and author, arrived in Key West in the mid 1980s. After nearly a decade of living aboard their 38-foot sailboat, La Dulce Mujer, <\/i>they dockedat the old Navy pier and decided it was time to become landlubbers again. This was not simply a practical matter\u2014two kids and a sculpture studio were more than the boat could hold\u2014but an emotional transition as well, because they had built La Dulce Mujer with their own hands.<\/p>\n

\u201cSailing Down the Mountain,\u201dBen\u2019s account of their sojourn in the Costa Rican highlands, where the boat took shape over three and a half years, is about to be published, and it promises to be both an excellent adventure and a cautionary tale. In a short version that appeared in Boatbuilder magazine ten years ago, Ben admitted that the project, \u201cwhen looked on objectively, lacked any element of common sense.\u201d But they did it anyway. As much as Helen and I have in common, that\u2019s more than I would have been willing to take on, even in my most daring days. So when I tell you that Helen A. Harrison is an artist, a creative thinker and a risk-taker, I\u2019m not tooting my own horn.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My “Eye On Art” column appears monthly in the Sag Harbor Express __________________ Franz Kline’s Roadster Reborn 12-4-2014 In the winter of 1960, William McCleery learned that the Old Whaler\u2019s Church was giving away a broken pump organ, so he and his wife Alice drove out to Sag Harbor from their home in Bay Shore … Continue reading Eye On Art – 2014<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":12,"menu_order":96,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"page_1_column_wide.php","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-511","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/511\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":519,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/511\/revisions\/519"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/12"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenharrison.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}